Notes

1] In the year 2000, Don Foster, an English professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, used external and internal evidence to show that Clement Clarke Moore could not have been the author of this poem, but that it was probably the work of Livingston, and that Moore had written another, and almost forgotten, Christmas piece, "Old Santeclaus." Foster's analysis of this deception appears in his Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York: Henry Holt, 2000): 221-75. Back to Line

22] Later revised to "Donder and Blitzen" by Clement Clarke Moore when he took credit for the poem in Poems (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1844). Back to Line